I've been reaching out with Drupal to the LETS movement for five years and to the time banking movement for three. I focused on these because I believed that they had the power of collective decision making, they needed good advice and because getting them all to use the same software framework would be efficient, enabling them all to put more resources into core activities.
But overall that strategy is not working for Community Forge. We have made substantial headway with LETS in Francophone Europe, largely due to the efforts of my colleague Tim, who is also the Co-chair of Sel Du Lac in Geneva. We have done lots of PR work and have have a growing volunteer base, but adoption of the Hamlets package by active communities is less than 2 a month since our founding 4 years ago.
A couple of Belgian SELs opted out in favour some home-grown software, GesTech, which is even more basic than the my first LETS accounting application from 2005. It won't be helpful for groups looking to the future of exchange, but for them, its being simple and close to home trumped all over values.
And that's probably why the largest community exchange network CES is growing so fast. Its offering is one size fits all, highly functional, mostly centralised and proprietary but free and with no business model.
Similarly, the war between Timebanks USA and hOurworld (which started off as a breakaway group) seems to have tipped in favour of the latter. Community Weaver is a major revenue raiser for TBUSA but never afforded its own upgrade to Drupal 7. Time & Talents is free but proprietary home grown software with no business model. Time Banks themselves have shown they don't care about open source, extensibility, future-proofing or political control of the software. The bottom line is that it is usable and preferably that someone else pays for it.
But efficiency and resilience are somewhat mutually exclusive. Most communities are clambouring on to these platforms in order to become more efficient (shared code, low costs, less maintainance) but GesTech represents a choice for resilience (since it is small, relies on few people and few technologies) at a huge cost to efficiency, (since it has very few users and little functionality).
Community Forge's initial free offering is of efficiency, but the deeper invitation is to resilience, when hosted communities are invited to take full control of their sites, customise them, experiment with them, even host their own, and help each other. This involves a lot more cost and engagement, especially when it is time to upgrade all those customised sites, but this is the path I down which I was hoping to lead our partners. However the notion of resilience is unfamiliar to many LETS people.
I want to give range of tools they can develop and maintain, an Open farm Tech for web applications. The advantage of Drupal is that each community can assemble its own web infrastructure according to its evolving understanding. Resilience means there is no one size fits all software, which is easy to maintain. They need a warehouse of modules which work together, not just accounting tools and not just a Hamlets distro. They are likely to need
- intertrading
- a global non-money marketplace
- tools supporting organic governance
- reputation systems
But, five years into the global financial meltdown, where are these communities who have realised that the government is not their protector, and who taking the initiative, organising themselves? How excrutiatingly slowly they are emerging!
That's why this week I'm meeting with the Global Ecovillage Network.
Comments4
Perhaps what's needed is an
Perhaps what's needed is an API for local monetary (or credit/time bank) systems so a higher layer can be constructed that allows international exchange between them all. People could then take their credit standing or their hours with them when they move, and as the local systems get more robust linking to more businesses, international purchases or international exchange could emerge...
Matthew I think we might beg
Matthew I think we might beg to differ on your idea that we, "have no business model" => Terry may respond here... We would also argue that there is not, 'a war between Timebanks USA and HourWorld' => Linda may respond here... (please spell our name correctly as hOurworld)
Thank you for your reflections on the history of your involvement! We have also been developing our software for 7 years, and participating as hOurworld for three. We have an intertrading doorway for all our local exchanges. We're actually quite impressed with the growth and expansion of timebanking here and abroad. There is a fundamental social change at work here that you and I are both contributing to in albeit different yet very significant ways. The fact that there is any demand at all for time banking tools is wonderful.
Kudos to you for working so hard to further the movement!
Best,
Stephen
We're trying, we're
We're trying, we're trying!!!!
Matt, I'm trying to
Matt, I'm trying to understand what you mean by efficiency and resilience
I'm not sure the couple of Belgian SEL you talk about were complaining about resilience...rather about effciency
But maybe efficiency for them is not efficiency for you
Efficiency for them is having a tool facilitating the management of their communities, so that they can have more time for dealing with their community
And it seemed to them that cforge sofware was not the good tool for this
As you wrote : This involves a lot more cost and engagement, especially when it is time to upgrade all those customised sites
Maybe they forget the resilience side of the sofware.